Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Dana Goldstein in The Atlantic partly agrees with the California superior-court judge who ruled this week that the state's teacher tenure system is a mess and discriminates against the state's poorest students. But Goldstein argues that simply abolishing tenure is not the answer. The problem is that good teachers simply don't want to teach in decrepit, disorganized, and discontented schools. "The lesson here is that California's tenure policies may be insensible, but they aren't the only, or even the primary, driver of the teacher-quality gap between the state's middle-class and low-income schools. The larger problem is that too few of the best teachers are willing to work long-term in the country's most racially isolated and poorest neighborhoods. There are lots of reasons why, ranging from plain old racism and classism to the higher principal turnover that turns poor schools into chaotic workplaces that mature teachers avoid. The schools with the most poverty are also more likely to focus on standardized test prep, which teachers dislike. Plus, teachers tend to live in middle-class neighborhoods and may not want a long commute. Educational equality is about more than teacher-seniority rules: It is about making the schools that serve poor children more attractive places for the smartest, most ambitious people to spend their careers." Read more in this week's Weekend Read.

In the Carnegie Journal of Ethics and International Affairs, Roger Berkowitz argues that the increasing reliance on drones is threatening our humanity-but not as usually thought. In "Drones and the Question of 'The Human,'" Berkowitz argues it is a mistake "to use the term 'drone' to refer only to these much publicized military devices. Drones, more precisely understood, are intelligent machines that-possessed of the capacity to perform repetitive tasks with efficiency, reliability, and mechanical rationality-increasingly displace the need for human thinking and doing.... The trend Jünger and Turkle worry about is unmistakable: we are at risk of losing the rich and mature relationships that mark us as human. The rise of social robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other one-dimensional machines that act like humans-without the perceived human weaknesses of distraction, emotion, exhaustion, quirkiness, risk, and unreliability-answers a profound human desire to replace human judgment with the more reliable, more efficient, and more rational judgment of machines. For all the superficial paeans to human instinct and intuition, human beings, in practice, repeatedly prefer drone-like reliability to the uncertain spontaneity of human intuition. In other words, we confront a future in which 'human' is a derogatory adjective signifying inefficiency, incompetence, and backwardness."

Karl Marx imagined that in a socialist utopia, everyone would work less and have more time to study or pursue hobbies. But contrary to Marx's prophecy-and also the prediction of John Maynard Keynes, who argued in the 1930s that improving productivity would result in significantly more leisure time for workers-increases in productivity have coincided with longer workdays. In an ever-wealthier society with more disposable income, the idea of leisure time is becoming culturally devalued. In an interview with Thomas Frank, David Graeber observes that this development has happened in part because of the creation of "bullshit jobs," which he describes as "the kind of jobs that even those who work them feel do not really need to exist," and work coming to be seen as a virtue in itself-and all the more virtuous if the job in question offers little intrinsic gratification: "Suddenly it became possible to see that if there's a rule, it's that the more obviously your work benefits others, the less you're paid for it. CEOs and financial consultants that are actually making other people's lives worse were paid millions, useless paper-pushers got handsomely compensated, people fulfilling obviously useful functions like taking care of the sick or teaching children or repairing broken heating systems or picking vegetables were the least rewarded. But another curious thing that happened after the crash is that people came to see these arrangements as basically justified. You started hearing people say, 'well, of course I deserve to be paid more, because I do miserable and alienating work,' by which they meant not that they were forced to go into the sewers or package fish, but exactly the opposite-that they didn't get to do work that had some obvious social benefit. I saw a very interesting blog by someone named Geoff Shullenberger recently that pointed out that in many companies, there's now an assumption that if there's work that anyone might want to do for any reason other than the money, any work that is seen as having intrinsic merit in itself, they assume they shouldn't have to pay for it. He gave the example of translation work. But it extends to the logic of internships and the like so thoroughly exposed by authors like Sarah Kendzior and Astra Taylor. At the same time, these companies are willing to shell out huge amounts of money to paper-pushers coming up with strategic vision statements who they know perfectly well are doing absolutely nothing."

Evan Hughes considers Karl Ove Knausgaard's suggestive titling of his six book autobiographical opus My Struggle, rendered in its original Norwegian as Min Kamp. Noting that the title was proposed by a friend, and suggesting that it is in some way a response to Knausgaard's childhood spent near the home of famous Norwegian author and Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun, Hughes also considers the way that Knausgaard's distinguishes himself, "sometimes speak[ing] in interviews and public appearances of an irony inherent in the name of the book; where Hitler is all ideology and rigid perfection in Mein Kampf, Knausgaard's struggle as a middle-class dad is quotidian, messy, faintly ridiculous. But his book is not all that ironic or clever. In fact, its directness and sincerity-to the point of frequent, unembarrassed cliché-contributes to the almost shocking immediacy of the voice. My Struggle makes no apologies. Knausgaard does not protect himself from the charge of narcissism by turning to self-deprecation or rationalization or literary tricks. Go ahead and say it's nothing much, he seems to say, but this is my struggle. For me, it counts."

Evgenia Peretz considers the recent blowup in literary criticism over the quality of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch deserves its popularity. Noting that these questions are malleable, she provides an example: "The questions are as old as fiction itself. The history of literature is filled with books now considered masterpieces that were thought hackwork in their time. Take Dickens, the greatest novelist of the Victorian period, whose mantle writers from John Irving to Tom Wolfe to Tartt have sought to inherit. Henry James called Dickens the greatest of superficial novelists ... 'We are aware that this definition confines him to an inferior rank in the department of letters which he adorns; but we accept this consequence of our proposition. It were, in our opinion, an offence against humanity to place Mr. Dickens among the greatest novelists.... He has added nothing to our understanding of human character.'"

This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Champlin discusses the dual nature of thinking as a human activity in the Quote of the Week. Swiss philosopher and poet Henri-Frédéric Amiel provides this week's Thought on Thinking. And Roger Berkowitz discusses the value of tenure as both a luxury and evil in the Weekend Read.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

With the conditions at the United States military detention facility in Guantanamo recently coming under scrutiny comes renewed attention to the case of Mohammed Jawad, the first Guantanamo detainee to testify, under oath and to a military commission, that he had been tortured while being held. Last month, a dramatic reading of statements made by Jawad's lawyer, David Frakt, juxtaposed with statements made by the case's lead prosecutor, Darrel Vandervelde, who left the military in order to help free Jawad, was held at the Pen World Voices Festival of International Literature. In their statements, both men use the language of Constitutionality to suggest that, by torturing detainees such as Jawad, "America," as Frakt puts it, "lost a little of its greatness." Vandervelde writes of his choice to testify in favor of Jawad: "I did it because I believe in truth, justice, the rule of law, and our common humanity. I did it for Mohammed Jawad, I did it because it was my duty, and I did it for us all."

Cass Sunstein summarizes Jeremy Adelman's recent, and massive, biography of the twentieth century scholar Albert Hirschman. Describing him as a thinker whose work has direct relevance to today's questions, Sunstein both praises Adelman's work and Hirschman's, saying of the latter: "He insisted that human history provides stories, intricate and often nonrepeatable,' which 'look more like tricks history has up its sleeve than like social-scientific regularities, not to speak of laws.'" Hirschman sought, Sunstein writes, "to "prove Hamlet wrong." In Shakespeare's account, Hamlet is immobilized and defeated by doubt. Hirschman was a great believer in doubt-he never doubted it-and he certainly doubted his own convictions. At a conference designed to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his first book, who else would take the opportunity to show that one of his own central arguments was wrong? Who else would publish an essay in TheAmerican Economic Review exploring the "overproduction of opinionated opinion," questioning the value of having strong opinions, and emphasizing the importance of doubting one's opinions and even one's tastes? Hirschman thought that strong opinions, as such, "might be dangerous to the health of our democracy," because they are an obstacle to mutual understanding and constructive problem-solving. Writing in 1989, he was not speaking of the current political culture, but he might as well have been."

Kelefa Sanneh reviews in The New Yorker; The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber and Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott. Graeber, an anthropologist, became famous as one of the intellectual leaders of Occupy Wall Street. Scott is also an anthropologist and a fellow anarchist. "Graeber did his anthropological field work in the highlands of Madagascar, and Scott did his in Southeast Asia, but their conclusions were similar. Both of them encountered communities that lived more or less autonomously, finding ways to resist or ignore whatever governments claimed jurisdiction over them. And both are eager to expand the history of lived anarchism beyond Paris and Catalonia; it is, they argue, broader and more common than we've been taught." Sanneh understands that "in America anarchism's appeal surely has something to do with the seeming durability of our current arrangement, and the inexorable growth of the government that maintains it. Such is the power of a sprawling and sophisticated state: the bigger it gets, the easier it becomes for us to imagine that we could live without it."

Julia Hobsbawm gives her father, the historian Eric Hobsbawm, a eulogy with familial warmth that is well aware of his global stature. Still, she focuses mostly on his love for her, for ideas and, importantly, for books of all kinds: "I called his mobile to check in and asked if he needed anything. He had a big sweet tooth and I expected him to ask for some fruit jellies, a favourite, or perhaps some dark chocolate. 'I managed to bring a most turgid book in with me, he said apologetically. 'Would you mind getting me something better?' It turned out that the book he had picked up, assuming it was the last he would ever hold, was a German edition of The Brothers Karamazov, and with the crisis over it was now not to his liking. Knowing his weakness for thrillers - one book wall is covered in the Penguin crime paperbacks with the green spines, his old Ed McBains and more recently Elmore Leonards - I brought him in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. It got him through the hospital tedium and even prompted a rather racy discussion about how much marital bed-hopping it featured. 'Too much,' he declared."

Alice Gregory praises author and essayist Janet Malcolm, highlighting in particular her suspicion of the truth claim of any narrative: "Malcolm would say that any story-and especially a well-told and well-reported one-is inevitably a distortion. Throughout her career, she has insisted upon this. 'The realities of characters in fiction-and of their cousins in journalism-derives precisely from the bold, almost childlike strokes from which they are drawn,' she writes in Reading Chekhov."

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

On July 13 of 2011, David Graeber published an essay in the Canadian journal Adbusters called "Awaiting The Magical Spark," an essay asking what it would take to set off a revolution in the West similar to those in the Middle East. It was the same day Adbusters put out its now infamous call for a movement occupying Wall Street.

On August 2nd, Graeber attended what was advertised as a General Assembly meeting on Bowling Green. An experienced anarchist, Graeber became angry that the General Assembly was actually a traditional protest meeting not interested in hearing ideas from the protesters. With two friends, he organized a splinter group that gathered on the other side of Bowling Green Park. It was this alternate General Assembly initiated by Graeber that, over the next six weeks, organized the Occupy Wall Street movement. This is one reason that David Graeber has been called the anti-leader of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Beyond his actual role as the original facilitator of OWS, Graeber has claim as well to being one of the movement's intellectual torchbearers. A Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmith's University in London, he has published widely on anarchism both in the ancient world and in the contemporary west. His book Direct Action: An Ethnography, is an ethnographic account of the anarchist movement and protests at the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec. Just this year Graeber published Debt: The First 5000 Years, a rambling and also rambunctious revisionist history, one that argues against the moral grounds for repaying our debts. A constant refrain in Debt is that the moral responsibility to repay debts is part of an inhuman commercial logic.

Both Graeber's anarchism and his calls for a universal forgiveness of consumer and international debt—a forgiveness in the spirit of a biblical jubilee—has set him at the forefront of debates that swirl around the storm that is Occupy World Street. As he writes in Debt:

“It seems to me that we’re long overdue for some kind of biblical-style jubilee, one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt. It would be salutary, not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality. That all these things are human arrangements and, if democracy is to mean anything, it is to the ability for all to agree to arrange things in a different way.”

Graeber's views may strike fear into the heart of Wall Street and the bankers who hold all those credits, but his radical proposals are catching on amongst many in the 99%. And some in the business press are taking notice. He was recently featured in an essay in Business Week Magazine. And the investing website Minyanville just published a rich interview with Graeber. This interview, done by Kevin Depew over at Minyanville, is your read for this Thanksgiving weekend..

In the Minyanville interview, Graeber says:

And one of the things that really fascinated me was the moral power of the idea of debt. I would tell stories to people, very sympathetic people, liberal lawyers, well-meaning do-gooder types, and you’d tell these stories about horrible things. You know, in Madagascar, for example, the IMF came in with these policies, you have to cut the budgets because, god knows, we can’t reduce the interest payments you owe to Citibank, they owed all this money. And they had to do things like get rid of mosquito eradication programs, as a result that malaria returned to parts of the country where it had been wiped out for a hundred years and tens of thousands of people died and you had dead babies being buried and weeping mothers. I was there, I saw this sort of thing. You described this to people and the reaction would be, well, that’s terrible, but surely people have to pay their debts. You’re not suggesting they cancel it or default, that would be outrageous. And one of the things that really fascinated me was the moral power of the idea of debt.

Well just such an outrageous act is what Graeber has in mind. Read on.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.